Today, though, anonymity vanished even earlier than expected when a pleasant-looking young woman boarded the train at Berwick-upon-Tweed and slid back the door to Josephine’s carriage. She struggled apologetically with her luggage, but a gentleman quickly stood to help her wrestle a large, beautifully embroidered travelling bag into the overhead luggage rack, and she smiled gratefully at him when he offered up his window seat. As the girl settled herself in, Josephine gazed at her in fascination, but it was not so much her features that drew attention as the remarkable hat that framed them – a cloche, made of fine black straw, which was accentuated on one side by a curled white ostrich feather, flecked with beige and brown and attached by a long, black-tipped hatpin. It was hardly the sort of thing that Josephine would ever wear herself, and it made her own plain velvet seem bland in comparison, but she admired its delicate beauty nonetheless.
The young woman nodded brightly at her and Josephine returned to her paper but, as she scanned the racing pages, she was uncomfortably conscious of being watched. When she looked up, the girl turned hurriedly back to her magazine, acutely embarrassed at having been caught, and began to study its pages with 5
exaggerated interest. Aware that the journey would be more relaxed for both of them if she smoothed the moment over, Josephine broke the ice. ‘You know, I often think that for all the nonsense these racing pundits talk, I could get a job doing it myself,’ she said.
The girl laughed, delighted to have a chance at conversation. ‘As long as it doesn’t take you away from the stage,’ she replied, and –
as she noticed Josephine’s surprise – looked aghast at her own familiarity. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she continued, ‘and I really don’t want to be a nuisance, but I’ve just got to say something. It is you, isn’t it? I recognised you straight away from that lovely art-icle. What a wonderful coincidence!’
Josephine forced a smile and quietly cursed the publicity photograph that had appeared in one of the more obscure theatrical journals, confirming to its handful of readers that Gordon Daviot
– the name she wrote under – was certainly not hers by birth.
‘How observant of you,’ she said, embarrassed to see that the other occupants of the carriage were taking a new interest in their travelling companion. ‘That came out a year ago – I’m surprised you remember it.’
‘That’s the coincidence – I read it again just the other day when I found out I was coming down to see
6
Touched, Josephine folded away her newspaper. ‘It’s not silly,’
she said. ‘If you took any notice of people who think it is, there’d be no pleasure in the world. I’m sorry to hear about your father, though. Was his death very sudden?’
‘Oh no, he’d been ill for a long time. He was in the army, you see, and he never recovered from the war.’ She smiled ruefully.
‘And sometimes I think my mother will never recover from my father. She was devastated when we lost him – we both were – but she’s been better lately. And we work together, so at least I’ve been able to keep an eye on her.’
‘What do you do?’ Josephine asked, genuinely curious.
The girl raised her eyes, and this time her smile was warm and conspiratorial. ‘Can’t you guess? We’re in hats.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Elspeth, by the way. Elspeth Simmons.’
‘Call me Josephine. It’s beautiful, you know – your hat.’ Elspeth blushed and started to protest, but Josephine interrupted her. ‘No, honestly – if I’ve got to sit here and take compliments, then you must have your share. You’ve got a real talent – it must run in the family.’
‘Perhaps, but I wouldn’t really know – I’m adopted, you see,’
Elspeth explained candidly. ‘They took me on when I was a baby.
You’re right – my adoptive mother taught me everything, but we’re not very much alike, although we get on tremendously well.
All this play business drives her up the wall – she hates the theatre, apart from a bit of variety at Christmas, so I usually go with my uncle. When I tell her how pleased I am to have met you, she probably won’t even know what I’m talking about. Still,’ she added, a little wistfully, ‘I like to think my original parents had some theatrical blood in them somewhere.’
Looking again at the memorable hat, Josephine guessed that Elspeth’s adoptive mother was not without her own sense of the dramatic. Although by now the girl had lost much of her initial shyness and was talking eagerly about the theatre, Josephine could not resent the loss of her cherished peace and quiet. Rather, she felt a growing admiration for Elspeth’s spirit and lack of self-pity. Her conversation did not entirely mask the series of tough 7
blows that life had dealt her: abandoned as a baby, then claimed again only to have her second chance at happiness destroyed by a conflict which she was of no age to understand – if such an age existed. Thousands like Elspeth there might have been, but the sharing of tragedy – even on such a scale – did not make the personal cost any easier to bear for each individual it touched.
Josephine knew that as well as anyone. Twenty years after it started, the war had reinvented its suffering for a second generation in the form of inescapable confinement with the sick and wounded, and an eventual loss whose pain was the more sharply felt for its delay. After her father’s long illness, then his death, who could blame Elspeth for taking refuge in the less demanding emotions of the stage, or for contemplating another, more glamorous, identity? It was not so different to what she herself had done and – in the face of her own father’s fragile health – what she continued to do.
‘I hope you won’t think it rude of me to ask,’ Elspeth continued,
‘but will you be sad when your play ends?’
Josephine had asked herself the same thing when she saw the press notice earlier. The answer had not required much soul-searching, although it would have been churlish to show the true extent of her relief. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘It’s going on tour, after all, and it’s lovely to think that people all over the country will see it. I do
